Capistrano is a utility and framework for executing commands in parallel on multiple remote machines, via SSH. It uses a simple DSL (borrowed in part from Rake, rake.rubyforge.org/) that allows you to define tasks, which may be applied to machines in certain roles. It also supports tunneling connections via some gateway machine to allow operations to be performed behind VPN’s and firewalls.
Capistrano was originally designed to simplify and automate deployment of web applications to distributed environments, and originally came bundled with a set of tasks designed for deploying Rails applications. The deployment tasks are now (as of Capistrano 2.0) opt-in and require clients to explicitly put “load ‘deploy’” in their recipes.
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Net::SSH v2 (net-ssh.rubyforge.org)
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Net::SFTP v2 (net-ssh.rubyforge.org)
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Net::SCP v1 (net-ssh.rubyforge.org)
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Net::SSH::Gateway v1 (net-ssh.rubyforge.org)
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HighLine (highline.rubyforge.org)
If you want to run the tests, you’ll also need to have the following dependencies installed:
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Echoe (for the Rakefile)
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Mocha (mocha.rubyforge.org)
Capistrano is “opinionated software”, which means it has very firm ideas about how things ought to be done, and tries to force those ideas on you. Some of the assumptions behind these opinions are:
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You are using SSH to access the remote servers.
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You either have the same password to all target machines, or you have public keys in place to allow passwordless access to them.
Do not expect these assumptions to change.
In general, you’ll use Capistrano as follows:
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Create a recipe file (“capfile” or “Capfile”).
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Use the
capscript to execute your recipe.
Use the cap script as follows:
cap sometask
By default, the script will look for a file called one of capfile or Capfile. The someaction text indicates which task to execute. You can do “cap -h” to see all the available options and “cap -T” to see all the available tasks.
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2005-2008 Jamis Buck <jamis@37signals.com>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.